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On a dark and otherwise serene night back in the 1960s, my grandpa, a doctor and recreational pilot, was ferrying two lawyers to a deposition. As they bisected the state of Washington, the airborne group encountered something surreal: An aircraft unlike anything they had ever seen before was flying straight toward them. My grandpa recalled an oblong flying machine, with blinking lights and an eerie ability to hover, that tracked his movements through the sky. When he ducked, the other object also ducked. And when he rose, it rose. While it was certainly an unidentified flying object, my grandpa never claimed he saw aliens. He seemed to believe that someday, the strange visit he’d received would be explained—in earthly terms. This family memory was the first thing I thought of when I read the recent New York Times story about U.S. Navy pilots who say they saw an unidentified flying object near the San Diego coast in 2004. In the story, titled “2 Navy Airmen and an Object That ‘Accel...

EGBERT Don't you just want to pinch his little hamster cheeks? Keith Pomakis via Wikimedia Commons Seeing something cute actually does bring out aggression in us, according to a paper presented at Society for Personality and Social Psychology's annual meeting in New Orleans last Friday. Researchers found 109 people to look at pictures of animals -- cute, funny and "neutral" photos of fluffy, fluffy puppies. The lucky participants then rated how they felt about the pictures: whether they agreed with the statement like "I just can't handle it!" (or perhaps "It's so fluffy I want to die!"), whether they made them want to squeeze something, or whether they were suddenly seized with the impulse to say something like "grr!" The cuter the animal, the more aggressive the response. The study's researchers, l Society for Personality and Social Psychology's annual meeting in New Orleans last Friday. ed by R...

INSECTS Travis Rathbone Five years ago, Richard Guiler and Tom Vaneck were sitting at a bar a few blocks from their office, trying to take their minds off work. For nearly a year, the two engineers had been struggling to develop a durable drone that could dodge objects, navigate inside buildings, and fly in stormy weather. They’d tried fixed-wing models, but adding enough sensors to effectively detect obstacles made them too heavy to fly. They’d tried helicopters, but the rotors kept getting tangled in branches and electrical wires. They’d even built a motorized balloon; all it took was a gentle gust of wind to blow it off course. As they sat nursing their beers, Guiler and Vaneck watched as a fly appeared to slam into a window. Instead of breaking apart on contact as their drones did, the insect bounced off the glass and recovered. Then it did it again. “It was an epiphany,” says Vaneck, who works for the Massachusetts research and development company Physical Science...

You are not alone in your quest for a flu shot, even this late into the season. The severity of the current epidemic has scared a lot of folks into getting their vaccines. But,since not even 40 percent of Americans had gotten their shot by November 2017, we’re now experiencing some spot shortages even at large pharmacies. That’s making it harder for people to actually get the shot—exactly what you don’t want at the peak of flu season.  lives of others. The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Anne Schuchat, said in a press call last week that “Because of the ongoing intensity of the flu season and the increasing circulation of influenza B and H1N1, we continue to recommend vaccination even this late in the season.” Unlike H3N2, the flu shot offers fairly good protection against the B and H1N1 strains, and Schuchat continued to stress that “some protection is better than none.” So here’s a quick guide to how to find a vaccine near you: Head over to...